Your IT Health: Remote Monitoring and Maintenance

When considering the overall health of your IT infrastructure one common area of concern is how to proactively (and affordably) keep common issues from becoming huge headaches with a side of down time. There are many small errors and hiccups that occur in any network environment on a daily basis. Most of these issues and errors are automatically cleaned up and handled by the systems themselves, however there are alsosome issues that require a System Administrator or Network Engineer to intervene before the issues impact users or cause down time.

One challenge of these IT issues is that the symptoms are not always readily apparent and often they are difficult to detect or correct until they grow into big issues.A common lamentin the IT community is "if I had only known sooner!". How then can you protect your firm from these small issues becoming bigger issues?

The solution is Remote Monitoring and Maintenance or RMM.

What is RMM?

An RMM solution provides your IT staff with the ability to diagnose issues almost instantly as they occur. Most RMM solutions use a monitoring agent on servers and workstations that monitor critical elements of the hardware, operating system, and even software running on the machine. When a problem occurs, an email can be sent to technicians so that they can respond to the error, sometimes before it starts affecting users. The ability to predict occurrences like hard drive failure can save an organization hours of expensivedowntime and even data loss. Monitoring critical services and application performance can help technicians troubleshoot errors and find root causes quicker and lead to better and more permanent fixes.

The second part of the solution critical to avoiding problems isMaintenance.. Anyone who has ever used a computer can attest to the importance of operating system updates. However, there are other aspects of computer maintenance that are often ignored. Deleting temporary files, defragmenting disks, and consistent and often reboots are necessary components of maintaining the overall health of a machine. These items are usually overlooked or not known to end users in general. An RMM solution automates these tasks so that they occur without any intervention from users. Another benefit is that updates are usually screened so that bad updates do not get through to computers. While generally safe, on rare occasions, Microsoft will release a patch that does more harm than good. Testing these patches is part of the RMM package and ensures that those bad updates do not get installed.

Other Benefits

Another benefit of the RMM solution is a 24/7/365 team of technicians in a Network Operations Center, or NOC, that can immediately resolve issues so your IT team can work on the big picture items such as application and server upgrades. This is especially important during off hours when technicians may not be available at all.

Many RMM solutions also have add-ins like Anti-Virus software (Webroot, Malwarebytes), Remote Access Software (LogMeIn, ScreenConnect), and scripting modules that can make installing software or making changes to multiple computers quick and easy. Automating these tasks turns into saving clients on billable hours.

DCNC is proud to offer ProCare+ as our in-house RMM solution. If you would to learn more about the benefits of Procare+ or to receive pricing information, give us a call at (303) 920-9472.